Two projects in IBM have recently decloaked, both which I've had the pleasure of working on:
Jazz
and
Project Zero.
Both projects have come under some attack by folks as being "not open source". For instance, see
Mark Pilgrim's typically humorous response
to Project Zero.
I'm not interested in talking about that specific aspect of the projects. I'm an open source commie
from way back, but the fact of the matter is that IBM contributes a lot of open source to various
communities, and at the same time produces commercial, proprietary software.
What I'm quite happy about with both products is the transparency they provide to
IBM's product
development process. The term "transparent" I've borrowed from Stephen O'Grady,
which he used to describe the Jazz development process.
I thought I'd give a quick
rundown on the transparency I've experienced in my 20+ years of software development at IBM.
From 1985 till about 1995 I worked on projects internal to IBM, and didn't really have a need
to deal with customer feedback on the products I was working on, because they were internal to
IBM. We did have a 'newsgroup'-like system called "IBMPC Conferencing" that was a fantastic
resource for IBMers. Not a whole lot of people used it (relatively), which was unfortunate,
but also kept the wheat/chaff percentage quite high. It did serve as a way to communicate
with our internal customers though.
The IBMPC conferencing system expanded sometime in the early 1990's to allow customers
access to a restricted set of 'newsgroups' called CFORUMs. This was quite convenient for IBM developers,
since it used the same news system we already knew how to use, and customers also had access
to it somehow. Sometime later, IBM created a real NNTP server named
news.software.ibm.com, which served the same
purpose as CFORUMs, but used the more 'standard' NNTP protocol.
By this time, I was working on VisualAge Smalltalk, and we created at least one newsgroup
for it on the NNTP server. For other projects I was involved with later, we also created newsgroups on the
server.
So, we've provided some kind of newsgroup-y access to product groups for a while.
However, we were limited in what we could actually discuss on the newsgroups. While
we would frequently accept bug reports from users posted to the newsgroups, we
couldn't really provide bug tracking numbers, since there was no way for users to
access our bug tracking systems. We did it anyway, to at least give our users
a shorter handle by which to reference the bugs.
For new feature requests, or requests for when the next release would be made available,
you'd typically see a response of "We cannot provide information regarding future versions
of the product". Which was insanely frustrating for us developers. But we
bit our tongues and pasted that response into posts, a lot.
So now, roll forward to the mid-late 2000's, with Jazz and Project Zero.
We have 'newsgroup'-y access like we have had for a while. But we also have access
to the bug tracking systems. And source code management systems. And a general
notion of talking more openly about future release content and dates (I hope!)
It certainly seems to me, that over time, we've become more transparent with our
development processes for our commercial products. I think this is great for
customers, who will have more direct access to the product development teams and
the product development process itself. It's also great for
the development groups within IBM, as these open processes
are a great equalizer: both new hires and CTOs have the opportunity to converse
equally with customers.
I'm a firm believer in this sort of transparency being a benefit to everyone, and
I'm looking forward to this becoming the rule rather than the exception for more IBM products.
